Up to 8 hours of continuous reading or 7.5 hours of video playback, with wireless off. Battery life will vary based on wireless usage, such as web browsing and downloading content.

Charge Time

Fully charges in approximately 4 hours via included U.S. power adapter. Also supports charging from your computer via USB.

Wi-Fi Connectivity

Supports public and private Wi-Fi networks or hotspots that use 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, or enterprise networks with support for WEP, WPA and WPA2 security using password authentication; does not support connecting to ad-hoc (or peer-to-peer) Wi-Fi networks.

Amazon Silk

Modern websites are complex. A typical web page requires 80 files served from 13 different domains. This takes a regular browser hundreds of round trips, and adds to page load times.

Amazon Silk is different in a radical new way. We've rebuilt the browser software to push pieces of the computation into the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. This lets Silk do more work, more quickly, and all at once. We call this "split browser" architecture. Silk browser software resides both on Kindle Fire and on the massive server fleet that comprises the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Shorter Transit Times

Amazon EC2 is always connected to the backbone of the Internet where round-trip latency is shorter than what’s typical over wireless connections. Because AWS also has relationships with major internet service providers, and many top sites are hosted on EC2, many web requests will never leave the extended infrastructure of AWS, reducing transit times to only a few milliseconds.

Computing Power in the Cloud

Silk uses the power and speed of the EC2 server fleet to retrieve all of the components of a website simultaneously, and delivers them to Kindle Fire in a single, fast stream. Transferring computing-intensive tasks to EC2 helps to conserve your Kindle Fire battery life.

Page Indexes & Machine Learning

As Silk serves up millions of page views every day, it learns more about the sites and pages it renders, and by observing aggregate traffic patterns, it can infer where users might go next. For example, Silk might observe that 85 percent of visitors to a leading news site click on that site’s top headline. With that knowledge, the browser makes intelligent decisions about pre-pushing popular content to the Kindle Fire, making commonly-visited pages available even faster.

NEW — Reading View

Engaging online content is often surrounded by a host of related links, advertisements, and other competing material. With Reading View for Silk, content is elevated above the clutter. When Reading View is invoked, Silk loads the body of the page in a reading-optimized, single screen view – even for multi-page articles. The full page is still available in the background, allowing readers to easily toggle back to a traditional view to see other interesting features on the page.

UPDATE November 2012 - With the Kindle Fire HD out now, I highly recommend it over this older version, as it fixes many of the problems I mention in my review. No one should buy this original version of the Kindle Fire unless you can get it for very cheap. I would also recommend theKindle Fire HD 8.9" over the 7" Fire, as I feel the increased size has a dramatic effect on the tablet experience.

The first and most important thing that should be said about the Kindle Fire is that this is not an "iPad-killer." It is not designed to be. I have seen so many articles and comments comparing this to the iPad, and surveys where people are asked if they will be buying a Kindle Fire over an iPad this Christmas. If you are expecting an iPad, or even a tablet, you will be disappointed. The main purpose of this device is to deliver Amazon content to you more effectively. It is designed for consumption, not creation. That is the reason it is so cheap and why Amazon is taking a loss on it. They are hoping to make up for that loss through sales of videos, music, books, and apps through Amazon's Web Services. You can also use it to view your own movies and media, but will find that it is more limited in that way than a regular tablet. Personally, as someone who has ordered several rentals from Amazon Video, and had to contact customer support for every single one of them due to problems with Amazon's Unbox player or purchases not appearing in my downloads, I can really appreciate this.Read more ›

I've had a chance to play with the Kindle Fire for a few hours now, and overall I think it is a great tool /toy when you factor in the cost of ownership and what you get. Compared to $500 minimum for the introductory price of the bottom of the line iPad2 (WiFi only), at $199 this is a great buy.

Using a Wifi connection at two different locations, the speed was pretty fast connecting to the Amazon server as well as to a couple of Internet sites. I had fast connectivity and display on Fox News, CNN, my personalized Yahoo page, and the website of the International Association of Penturners (hey, I do have hobbies!). I had slow connectivity at both Wifi locations with Google, ESPN, MSNBC, the Houston Chronicle, and the Weather Channel - I hope the unique app for ESPN and the Weather Channel are a lot faster, but I haven't loaded them onto the Fire yet. I will point out with the exception of the Google website, those other sites listed as slow are usually slow on my other handheld devices such as my Droid phone and my work iPad2 (yes, the Kindle guy owns and uses an iPad for work purposes). The web browser is called Silk, and it is nice and user-friendly.

Let's talk about what I see as the benefits first:

The screen size to me is just right for what I will be using it for - I have used an iPad and the screen is larger - but I did watch about 15 minutes of an episode of season 3 of 24 on the Fire and I didn't have screen envy or felt like I was missing anything. The sound quality was good, but I listened to it mainly with a set of headphones so I wouldn't wake my kids.

Concerning size of the overall unit - not too heavy or bulky and it fits nice in your hand.Read more ›

As a long-time Kindle fan I was eager to get my hands on a Fire. For the most part I've found that it does what I wanted it to, which is be the one device I can take with me anywhere. There are some great features; the reader app is excellent (though not without flaws), the app store experience is terrific, videos are fantastic, and the device is quick and for the most part dead-simple to use, all thanks to the services Amazon provides. And of course the extras that come with Prime membership really make it a real value - I won't be cancelling my Netflix streaming account just yet (watching Netflix on the Fire works very well) but I imagine within a year Amazon's free streaming video catalog will be just as good as Netflix. The free "lending library" book every month really is the icing on the cake though, and makes Prime membership a no-brainer. The hardware itself is solid and has a quality feel, it's just the right size for one-handed use, and the screen is fantastic (for an LCD screen) with good brightness and excellent color, and a very wide viewing angle. So as a reader, video player and music streaming device the Fire excels, and as an occasional browsing, emailing, game playing tablety thing it does pretty well.

But there are some downsides too; the small bezel size makes holding it without inadvertent page-turns difficult, the lack of buttons makes controls harder, the accessible storage memory is limited to just 5GB, which seems awfully small when carrying my own video content on a trip, and overall the interface of the system is just a little awkward and unfinished. Sometimes the back button doesn't work, buttons are hard to push accurately or launch the wrong function, navigation isn't exactly intuitive, etc.Read more ›